There’s a lot on Mike Pence in the Friday Morning Jolt, and then this pessimistic interpretation of Obama’s brief deficit remarks in the State of the Union…

I was reminded of this thought from John Ellis, written roughly a year ago:
The Obama Administration keeps talking at us like its 1998 and we can have a “green” jobs program and national health insurance and “cap and trade” legislation and $250 million criminal proceedings for homicidal Islamic psychopaths in downtown Manhattan. We don’t have $250 million for the KSM trial in Manhattan. Everybody knows that except, apparently, the Obama Administration…
Until President Obama engages the Grand Narrative of our time, and makes it his own, he will remain disconnected from the broad national interest (“interest” in the sense of what people are interested in and “interest” in the sense of what is best for the country). This is not just another recession.
We have our answer. Faced with the defining problem of our time, President Obama examined all of the options ranging from painful and unpopular to even more painful and even more unpopular, lifted his head, looked the American people in the eye and declared…
“Present.”
The 3 a.m. phone call arrived — who would have guessed it would be the CBO calling with the crisis? — and Obama is letting it go to voice mail. Either we reform entitlements now with some pain or we confront their collapse sometime in the not-too-distant future with much worse pain. And yet, judging by Obama’s speech, what really excites him is high speed rail, manufacturing solar panels, and straightening out which department regulates salmon. He clearly has little interest in cutting government beyond defense.
It’s as if 9/11 occurred and President George W. Bush had responded, “yes, stopping the terrorists is important, but I was elected to enact education reform and that remains my top priority.”
If you or I were president, and someone came into the office telling us we’re set to borrow forty cents of every dollar the government spends, we would probably leap out of our chairs and start responding as if it were a crisis, down to lifting up the Oval Office couch seat cushions to look for change that fell out of visitors’ pockets. But no matter how dire the numbers get, Obama remains convinced we’re just one high-speed rail system away from winning the future and qualifying for the Temporal Playoffs or something.

As many of you know by now, the Jolt is subscriber-only, no charge, Monday through Friday…